Video inspection systems, such as borescopes, have been widely used for capturing images or videos of difficult-to-reach locations by “snaking” image sensor(s) to these locations. Applications utilizing borescope inspections include aircraft engine blade inspection, power turbine blade inspection, internal inspection of mechanical devices and the like.
A variety of techniques for inspecting the images or videos provided by borescopes for determining defects therein have been proposed in the past. Most such techniques capture and display images or videos to human inspectors for defect detection and interpretation. Human inspectors then decide whether any defect within those images or videos exists. These techniques are prone to errors resulting from human inattention. Some other techniques utilize automated inspection techniques in which most common defects are categorized into classes such as leading edge defects, erosion, nicks, cracks, or cuts and any incoming images or videos from the borescopes are examined to find those specific classes of defects. These techniques are thus focused on low-level feature extraction and to identify damage by matching features. Although somewhat effective in circumventing errors from human involvement, categorizing all kinds of blade damage defects within classes is difficult and images having defects other than those pre-defined classes are not detected.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial if an improved technique for performing defect detection were developed. It would additionally be beneficial if such a technique were automated, thereby minimizing human intervention and did not interpret defects based upon any categorization or classes.